Apocalypse (video game)
Apocalypse is a third-person shooter video game released for the PlayStation, developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. It features actor Bruce Willis, who provides the main character's likeness and voice. It was the first original game by Neversoft, prior to launching their Tony Hawk franchise. The game is a 3D third-person shooter very much in the style of Robotron. The player's character is moved using the Dual Shockcontroller's left stick, and shooting is handled independently by pressing the right stick in a given direction. Unlike its 2D inspiration, it is possible to duck or jump, and a selection of different weapons are available. Overview Apocalypse is a 3D shooter for the PlayStation, known mostly for its involvement with Bruce Willis. Originally, Bruce Willis was only going to be your sidekick in the game, but they decided that people would rather play as Bruce than with Bruce. This decision ended up making Bruce Willis the main protagonist of the game, the properly and generically named Trey Kincaid. This last-minute decision ended up hurting the game, rather than making it better. All of the dialogue recorded by Willis stood out in a bad way for obvious reasons. Since Willis was originally pegged only as the wise-cracking sidekick, none of his dialogue quite fits with the character and it feels like he's talking to someone who isn't there. It doesn't help that the dialogue was poorly written as well. Expect to hear "original" writing along the lines of "Open up a can of whoop-ass" and other such memorable catch-phrases. All the trouble that went into plugging Bruce Willis as the star of the game was mostly a waste since the in-game model barely resembled the actor. Plot Apocalypse takes place on an alien colony where religion is the dominant cultural force and science is considered to be the work of the devil. This is mainly due to the Reverend's teachings. His version of the gospel is widely accepted by billions of desperate men and women and leads to the banning of science. After gaining the trust of the majority of society, the Reverend uses the very science he condemned to create his own version of the Apocalypse. The only man who can stop the Reverend's evil ways is Trey Kincaid, a top scientist in the research of nanotechnology. The Reverend orders his "disciples" to break into Kincaid's lab, steal his research and lock him up in prison. Kincaid finds out about the Reverend's evil plan during the capture and proceeds to break out of prison and fight his way to the Reverend's doorstep. Kincaid battles his way through the streets and sewers until arriving at his final destination: his planet's version of the White House. The White House is where the fate of mankind will be written; either Kincaid saves the day, or the Apocalypse comes to fruition. Except from the Manual Precursor to the Apocalypse "The future is a troubled place of seething masses and conflicting ideas. Sprawling metropolitan landscapes cover the earth. These industrial gothic centers rumble with internal chaos and external strife. Religion and Science have become the world's dominant cultural forces, each offering their own version of salvation. These two opposite pillars of life battle for disciples as humanity verges on the breaking point. Science seeks the answers to life in technology while Religion condemns it as the sure path to Armageddon. For a while, Science seems close to proving technology is the answer to the complexities of modern life. Through the research of brilliant scientists, cloning, cold-fusion, and nano-technologies are no longer the stuff of science fiction. The miracles that Science has promised are inevitable. Violently opposed to such progress is a mysterious figure known only as the Reverend. The Reverend is a false prophet who evangelizes his version of the gospel to a world teeming with lost souls. Desperate men and women latch onto his teaching by the billions. The Reverend preaches that the approaching scientific breakthroughs are an offense against the one true God and declares science to be blasphemy. He seeks to suppress all scientific progress as tools of Satan. With the President of the United States a close personal friend, he succeeds in having all scientific research banned. The anti-techno dogma of the Reverend has prevailed. After eliminating all opposition, the Reverend proceeds with his true intentions. He turns to the same technology that he has publicly condemned to perpetrate evil. It is, ironically, the tools of the forbidden science which will enable the Reverend to conjure up his own version of the Apocalypse. He can no longer wait for judgement day to arrive, it must take place immediately. This depraved cleric is planning the deaths of billions in a grand genocidal event that will leave the earth in smoldering ruins. The Reverend tells his followers that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will walk among them. Death, Plague, War, and the Beast are the heralds of the coming Judgment Day. The world is mesmerized by the Reverend and his fabled Horsemen. Will Judgment Day truly arrive as he has prophesied? Only one man has an inkling of what the Reverend has in store for the world. He's a lone tech-renegade on the run named Trey Kincaid. Trey is a brilliant scientist whose rebellious ideas and breakthrough work in nano-technology have finally brought that fringe science beyond the prototype stage. At last, mankind is capable of creating complex machinery on the molecular level. Trey knew his experiments would one day provide the world with an answer to its prayers. But Trey's dreams are shattered when science is banned. The Reverend's thug "disciples" break into Trey's lab, steal his research, and massacre his coworkers. Trey is captured but not before he learns the truth. While the Reverend was also decrying science as the work of the devil, he was also secretly following Trey's research. With the information his thugs have stolen from Trey's lab, the Reverend plans to use his newly developed nano-tech resources to bring to life his own revelatory version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The end of the world is at hand, and the only true hope to mankind's salvation is Trey Kincaid." Gameplay The game plays a lot like Smash TV and Robotron; you move with the left analog stick and fire with the right analog stick. You could also change the controls and use the D-pad to move while shooting with the four face buttons. The biggest difference from those previously mentioned games is the fact that you have the ability to jump, which is similar to ASC Games' One. The frame rate is relatively solid and only drops in the most hectic of situations. Apocalypse is a 3D multidirectional shooter. The character is moved using the DualShock controller's left analog stick, and shooting is handled independently by pressing the right stick in a given direction, which automatically fires the current weapon in said direction. Alternately, movement may be controlled through the directional pad and shooting performed by using the four face buttons on a typical PlayStation controller (which lack analog sticks), where the buttons' placement on the controller correspond with the fire direction. Using the shoulder buttons it is also possible to duck or jump, and a selection of different weapons are available. Weapons There are various futuristic weapons in Apocalypse, all with various strengths and weaknesses and effective against different enemies. * Machine Gun - Trey's default weapon which never runs out of bullets. * Pulse Laser - A fast-shooting weapon that fires green laser bullets for slightly more damage than the Machine Gun. * Rip Laser - A laser that fires a continuous stream of purple light that tends to home in on nearby enemies. * Particle Beam - A gun that fires a long yellow beam/laser trail that can easily behead or dismember enemies. * Flamethrower - The traditional flamethrower that produces a wide spread of fire to burn enemy enemies in the radius of the flames. * Grenades - Hand-held explosives that explode upon contact with any solid surface. * Homing Missiles - Weak missiles that are capable of following enemies past many obstacles and for a long time, often above five seconds. * Rockets - Damaging rockets that can be fired in quick succession, and explode upon contact with a solid surface. * Smart Bomb - A special and very limited weapon that is capable of killing any enemy within the blast radius. The game's various levels are connected as themed units, each unit ending in a boss battle. * Kinkaide's escape from jail. Boss: Tank * Kinkaide's journey through the sewers to the city. Boss: Giant Crocodile * Kinkaide's flight through the city. Boss: Death * Across the rooftops. Boss: Helicopter * Through a graveyard to a nightclub. Boss: Plague * Into War's weapons factory. Boss: War * Into the White House: the President of the United States is in fact Beast, the final boss who has multiple lives. Characters Trey Kincaid (voiced by Bruce Willis): Once a great scientist, Trey Kincaid is now a lone rebel and on the run from Apocalypse's antagonist, Reverend. Trey helped contribute to a breakthrough in nanotechnology, which has now given mankind the ability to create complex machinery on a molecular level. Trey believed that this technology would lead to many great things, but his dreams soon came crashing down. Trey decides to fight back after his lab is broken into and all his research is stolen. Trey Kincaid is the only man who may stand a chance at stopping the end of the world. Reverend (voiced by Joe Frank):''' The game's main antagonist, Reverend is also a great scientist who creates a theocracy based around the inevitable apocalypse. He uses his scientific ability to create the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Beast, and Death. He does this to make sure that the Apocalypse does happen and locks up Trey to make sure this plan can't be stopped. Though he publicly called science the work of the devil; he privately followed the research of his ex-colleague Trey Kincaid. '''Horsemen of the Apocalypse: * War (voiced by Tom Wyner) * Plague (voiced by Poe) * Beast (voiced by Tom Wyner) * Death (voiced by Joe Frank) Development Prototype Game Engine, Pre-Production The game engine for Apocalypse was completed in January 1996. Initially, the player character was a mercenary accompanied by an AI-controlled partner, Trey Kincaid, in an effort to create the video game equivalent of a buddy film. Activision later signed a multi-million-dollar deal for Bruce Willis to provide Trey Kincaid's voice and likeness, using "cyber-scanning" and motion capture. Trey Kincaid's role was eventually changed to that of the main playable character, thus reducing the necessity for him to have as much spoken dialogue as was originally intended as the scope of Bruce Willis' involvement decreased as development went on. In the finished game, Willis' vocal contributions are limited mostly to the occasional one-liner and a few brief lines of dialogue in story sequences. Willis' face was photo-mapped onto Trey Kincaid's character model. His motion capture performance was recorded at House of Moves, a film studio in Venice, CA. The sessions were held in mid-January 1997 and took two days. During voice recording, Willis made a number of suggestions of changes to the dialogue, which the developers agreed to. Motion Capture and Actors Poe was cast as the character Plague using the same combination of cyber-scanning, motion capture, and voice recording as done with Willis. Apocalypse features several songs from various artists, including Poe and System of a Down. Technology developed for the game allowed live-action music videos from these artists to be projected on large screens within the game's environments. Level Design, Game Details A three-level "buddy AI" was developed for Kincaid, enabling Kincaid to take up aggressive or defensive approaches and attempt to get power-ups before the player character. Reworked Game Design, Used Big Guns Engine The Apocalypse game engine was reworked for use on Neversoft's next title, the seminal Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Already having in mind that they were going to begin work on Tony Hawk following completion of Apocalypse, the team said they had developed rough in-house playable demos of Trey Kincaid skateboarding around Apocalypse's game environments in order to experiment with the way they wanted Tony Hawk to feel. Even though Neversoft continued to develop and evolve the engine primarily to suit the needs of the Tony Hawk series, it was also put to use in another action title by the team, the popular Spider-Man game they released in 2000. The aspect of the engine that allowed for the live-action music videos to be displayed within Apocalypse's game world was also utilized in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater as well as other subsequent Neversoft titles. Involvement of Bruce Willis Willis' character, Trey Kincaid, was initially meant to be a non-playable sidekick character, but his role was eventually changed to that of the main playable character, thus reducing the necessity for him to have as much spoken dialogue as was originally intended as the scope of Willis' involvement decreased as development went on. In the finished game, Willis' vocal contributions are limited mostly to the occasional one-liner and a few brief lines of dialogue in story sequences. Willis' face was photomapped onto Trey Kincaid's character model, but he didn't perform any motion capture work for the game. Soundtrack Apocalypse features several songs from various artists including Poe and System of a Down. Technology developed for the game allowed live-action music videos from these artists to be projected on large screens within the game's environments. The game featured a few songs from notable artists to help make it feel more like a big-budget film. Those songs include: * "Back on a Mission" by Cirrus * "Accelerator" by Gearwhore * "Control" by Poe * "Stoopid" by Snot * "War?" by System of a Down Reception Next Generation reviewed the PlayStation version of the game, rating it two stars out of five, and stated that "you have an action title that is average at best. There really is nothing new or innovative here. And in this fourth generation of PlayStation games, this is simple not acceptable." The game received an average score of 71.30% at GameRankings, based on an aggregate of 20 reviews. Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot praised the game's gameplay as a shooter while criticising the voice acting for lacking any feeling and variety the game had. He later gave the game a score of 7.1/10. * See the game reviewed on Apocalypse Legacy Who Framed Miku Web-Media Universe Who Framed Miku had to strongly details and material general stories of the scene on live-action/anime animation videos in progress, Apocalypse internal gameplay, design, world designer, script, motion animation are also the using style on Anime-Reality segments including involvement side-kick recurring characters Kid. Blue Niuxlius Entertainment mentioned Apocalypse was originally concept game development was previously back in 1996 and 1997, it was the originally vision pitched to character of Trey Kincaid AI-smartest controlling partners and playable character as ‘The Kid’. It also referenced said the Activision game developer was development progress are rushed off by technical issues and shelf load cashier are wasted in time. Perhaps Apocalypse original version ‘Kid’ and ‘AI’ never seemed appearance in the game, In humor Neversoft Entertainment hired with Activision, Within the game came out about 9 months. Which was subsequently Neversoft made the re-designed and replacement Bruce Willis one-man system as ‘Main player character’ it makes honestly design are perfectly is much paying them, Neversoft was completed the game project from 9 months after upcoming game developed to PlayStation 1. Who Framed Miku featured Kid side-kick character affected the animated action-packs in Anime-Reality segments taken by the lead art and animation, It key-framed to 360 animated 3D effects in traditional. Gaming Videos Apocalypse still local on physical PlayStation 1 and emulation ePSXe, Since the legacy game goes on. By the time preserving Apocalypse gaming videos was post YouTube; James Emirzian Waldementer Gaming. Involved are met the game reviewed and revealed to Apocalypse said that ‘Very enjoyable and good straight forward shooter” He decided making more content through in the gaming videos. Development Crew * Apocalypse Credits External Links * Apocalypse on Giant Bomb * Apocalypse on CoolRom * Apocalypse on Mobygames * Apocalypse on IMDB Category:1998 video game Category:Activision games Category:Neversoft games Category:PlayStation 1 games Category:Games developed in the United States Category:Game scored by Tommy Tallarico Category:Games created past before the Who Framed Miku